North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society Free Audiobook Download by Jieun Baek

Jieun Baek's book North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society, tells the story of how technology and media have changed North Korea. In this book, she discusses how cellphones are used as an information weapon against the totalitarian regime. Since these phones can access South Korean and Western media, they've become a gateway to the outside world. This has led to a change in what people believe, what they know, and how they act. For example, many North Koreans now know that their government has been lying to them all along about everything from Kim Jong-il's death to food shortages.

In her book, journalist Jieun Baek explores how North Koreans are using the country's black market and smuggling networks to get information and media that cannot be accessed in North Korea. These include South Korean TV dramas, Western films, and Hollywood movies. The most popular are comedies that mock the North Korean regime. North Koreans are learning about life outside of their totalitarian state from these smuggled shows and films. This is part of a burgeoning "information underground" movement in which people secretly share new knowledge with others.

Jieun Baek's North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society provides an eye-opening look into one of the most closed societies on earth. Through interviews with approximately 100 defectors, Jieun Baek illustrates how information smuggled over China's border is changing North Korea from within. She also explains how the country's burgeoning market economy is creating new opportunities for North Koreans to participate in civil society.

"North Korea's Hidden Revolution" by Jieun Baek is a posthumously published book that could have been written in the 1960s. North Korea had already fallen under the spell of full-spectrum isolation and terror before they had even started building their country. The utopian dream of a self-reliant state was interrupted by World War II, when Japan invaded, divided Korea along the 38th Parallel, and installed their own loyal regime in the south. Paragraph: Baek argues that the revolutionaries who engineered this change were not those in power at Pyongyang’s central party offices or at its diplomatic outposts abroad but rather an informal group of dissident thinkers who came to be known collectively as the “Jangmadang generation.” These were people like Kim Kwang Jin, a former college lecturer from Pyongyang who now runs an economic research institute in Seoul; Lee Min Hoi, a political scientist and mathematician from Wonsan who publishes his work online; and Moon Kyung Kim, a university professor from Nampo who escaped to Seoul in 1993.

North Korea's Hidden Revolution is about the information underground in North Korea and how it's transforming a closed society. Author Jieun Baek, who grew up in North Korea, shares her insight into how it works. She says that the biggest challenge for those working to smuggle information into North Korea is making sure that the regime doesn't confiscate the USB sticks before they get to those who need them. Often the drives are hidden inside everyday objects such as pencils or heaters and then smuggled across the border.

North Korea is a difficult country to study because of its closed borders and being a Communist country. In this book, Jieun Baek, an expert on the intersection of information and power, explores how the North Korean leadership has followed Mao Zedong's maxim "To know the enemy better than he knows himself" by meticulously monitoring their own people. Despite government censorship and efforts to control what people know, the North Korean population is driving forces for change in the country through a 'hidden revolution': a growing network of illegal cellphones, radios with shortwave bands, and DVDs from China.